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Small business owners worry about being a target

“Why should I worry about a data breach?” asked the owner of a family-run limousine service when we invited him to a live hacking demonstration sponsored by HSB.

It’s easy to break into a computer system

It’s a question we hear often from people who think their business is too small to interest a cyber criminal. So we asked a pair of “white hat” hackers to show a group of small business owners how easy, and lucrative, it is to infiltrate their computer systems.

This video shows how it’s done

The limousine owner learned that credit card records and other private information he keeps are valuable to identity thieves. They look for weak security, in companies big and small, and accumulate data as you can see in this video of hackers in action.

Small business, big risk

What really hit home for the owner was an example of how a limousine company like his was used as a conduit, or entry point, into a larger corporate target.

Almost taken for a ride

Chinese hackers, who wanted to find out what a U.S. security response firm knew about them, hacked into a livery service that often drove the CEO. Then they sent the executive a phony invoice for a limo ride, with a Trojan virus attached. Had he opened the PDF, his computer and his company would have been compromised.

Business owner gets the message

“It had to be a limousine company,” the small business owner joked at the HSB event. But the story made an impression: he planned to review his data security and ask his insurance broker about adding data breach and cyber insurance.

Loss prevention and insurance protection

The small business owners gained a better understanding of the exposures — and how to help manage them.

They won’t take security for granted anymore

An engineering consultant realized that her employees could put her business information at risk by visiting social media sites on work computers.

A film producer saw that he was wrong in thinking that only big companies got hacked and now understood that almost every business is a target.

Several of the owners had taken for granted that the cloud and companies they outsourced information to were secure. Now, they planned to look more closely at that security.